THE NEED TO GET SMARTER ON BORDER SECURITY

The new Canada-U.S. border agreement to be
formally unveiled Wednesday will include, among
other measures, enhanced tracking procedures for
persons entering or leaving the country by air, land or sea.

It is bound to be denounced in some quarters here
=96 and already has been as reports of the
negotiations emerged =96 as a sellout of Canadian
sovereignty and an un-Canadian infringement on
privacy rights for the sake of easing access to
U.S. markets, even though in that respect it
offers some commendable provisions.

But our south-of-the-border partners in the deal
must also have been smitten with some second
thoughts about what they were getting into when
they got wind of the latest federal
auditor-general's report, which slapped a failing
grade on the competence of Citizenship and
Immigration Canada and the Canadian Border
Services Agency in evaluating people they let into the country.

Canada, it seems, is still living in a pre-9/11
world when it comes to evaluating visa
applicants, and in Victorian times when it comes
to screening for dangerous diseases.

The report fingered disturbing systemic weakness
down the line in the visa process. It said visa
officers who make decisions on who will be let in
lack the necessary information to make sound
judgments, and work from outdated manuals that
guide their decisions. They are, for the most
part, undertrained and overworked, and turnover
in the operation is such that 40 per cent have
fewer than two years' experience in their highly sensitive jobs.

The order-service analysts charged with providing
the information on which visa officers base their
decisions are said to be similarly undertrained,
and their work is rarely reviewed for thoroughness and accuracy.

When it comes to medical screening, standards
have not been upgraded for half a century, the
report notes with alarm. The focus is on only two
diseases, tuberculosis and syphilis, even though
Health Canada lists no fewer than 56 diseases
that must now be formally reported to doctors.

It also seems that, somewhat like problem
children, the agencies assigned to keep
undesirables out of the country don't play well
together. The report pointed to a distressing
lack of information-sharing among the immigration
service, the border agency, the RCMP and the
Canadian Security and Intelligence Service.

No formal reviews have apparently been conducted
to determine if visa officers and border-service
agents have access to enough information to make
reliable security assessments, and there is no
agreement in place with the RCMP and CSIS to give
the visa service and the border agency full
access to available information on the people
they have to process. As a result, there is the
potential of visas being approved without quibble
for people who are on another agency's watch list.

How high is the time to correct this state of
affairs? The report notes that for the past 20
years a succession of auditors-general have been
sounding similar alarms to a succession of governments.

Our current federal government professes to be
deeply concerned with keeping Canada safe and
secure. As concerns go, it would seem that
addressing this situation is more pressing than
locking up more juvenile offenders and small-time marijuana growers.